With every passing day, the benefit of social listening and data becomes more engrained in how we determine where we reach and market to people.

If you use social listening to identify marketing insights and innovations, you know the power of the outputs.  More than conversations, the data provides us knowledge of where those conversations are taking place.  We can also determine the volume of conversations as well as the influence of the people having those conversations at a particular URL.  That data combined with public traffic records now gives media planners the ability to pinpoint where their customers are engaged with content. 

The power of this data and knowledge can guide higher performing media plans.

Surprisingly, most media planners and buyers use antiquated methods to plan and purchase media.  Today, media buying companies rely on publishers to supply them with traffic stats and standard demographic data.  These are typically combined with third party reporting tools from firms like ComScore. 

Given the power of data @substancenyc is extrapolating out of our social listening exercises we decided to test a new way of building media plans.  Instead of using traditional methods of media planning we used our social listening tools to identify high volume conversations & influencer data to create a media plan that allowed our branded content to reach our target.

First we used social data to identify the right kind of customer.  Then we created a keyword list for our social listening tools to listen for. After that, we created an algorithm to extrapolate relevant conversations.  Once we identified the relevant conversations, we wrapped a volume metric around the URLs & places those conversations were talking place.  Once that was achieved we used a tools to identify the number of social influencers having the conversations.  Using the outputs of these simple exercises we created transmedia plan that effectively told our brand story.

How did we know this was going to outperform a traditional plan?

We tested it. We tested a traditionally built plan against a social data guided plan. The result, the social data plan out performed the traditional plan by 19%.  The social data plan had more reach and conversion than the traditional plan. 

This test has transformed the way we are going to market for our clients.

What are you doing today that could change the way we do business tomorrow?  Let us know @substancenyc.